Taichung Tower 2 Competition

Everyone is well aware of the measures one encounters when entering almost any tower, residential or office, in this era of high security. We are not just talking about protecting the occupants of a residential highrise, but rather the separation of workers from the street and the community at large. The Taichung Tower is intended as the antithesis to this concept of isolation, encouraging interaction at different levels, within the workplace, as well as access, though limited, to the community at large.

Taichung, certainly one of Taiwan’s most forward-looking cities, has just completed a final competition to complete the ambitious Taichung Cultural Center complex—a tower to replaced Sou Fujimoto’s abandoned winner of the initial Taichung Tower Competition (below). The Fujimoto scheme was shelved based on the high construction estimates for his revolutionary scheme—by some accounts doubling the anticipated budget.

A second try seems to hold more promise: the winning entry by Elizabeth de Portzamparc from Paris would seem to meet the requirements of the challenge while staying within the allowable budget guidelines.

Hardly a conventional tower, the building addresses the transition from the city and park to the tower with a ramping program, replete with greenery, intended to make it “an extension of the city.” More important, it addresses the current priorities centered around the new workplace, replacing isolation with a more open concept, both organizationally, as well as intellectually.

Except for the entry by Fei & Cheng Associates, the tendency to soften the impression of a simple ubiquitous tower motif with vegetation can also be observed in the other three entries—by applying various methods of façade penetration.

This tower will be the final major component in a plan incorporating a new Cultural Center by SANAA and a linear park by Catherine Mossbach and Philippe Rahm—both the result of competitions.

If these three components are to meld into a cohesive plan, one might assume that some fine-tuning may have to occur to address the interconnectivity to the linear park landscape plan. Whether this will occur still remains to be seen.

The competition was a two-stage, invited competition; the other finalists were:

The scheme by Elizabeth de Portzamparc would seem to address all of the issues that are in the forefront of the minds of current designers when improving the workplace atmosphere: “This tower has been designed with the ambition to become a reference in terms of technological connections and develoopment of human interactions.” The processional ramp from the city leading up into the main entrance of the building is a welcoming gesture to the community.

Also, by allowing some access to different areas of the tower for the public, the idea of grand isolation is reduced to a minimum—at least in theory. The designer also goes to great lengths to label the horizontal levels as “neighborhoods,” even suggesting that this idea somehow ties it together vertically. Since we don’t have a jury report, it might be assumed that the replacement of a simple platform at grade with a terraced configuration as pathway led to a serious discussion of its merits—and approval. Moreover, this was not to be just a simple viewing platform, but a working office environment.

It should be noted that the road separating the tower from the linear garden presented somewhat of an obstacle to a transitional link from the tower. The Portzampark scheme seemed to address this as best they could, providing several connections from the tower at different levels.

The Moriyama & Teshima Architects proposal was notable for its emphasis on history and education. As a vertical stacking process, their design featured “an interpretive journey of Taiwan’s land, culture and industry, which set a precedent for a healthy city model.” The spiraling path theme as educational element is reminiscent of UNStudio’s ramping plan for the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. In this case, history focuses on geography, local vegetation, local culture and industry, rather than connecting the exhibits on the different levels with world history. As was the case in Stuttgart, this would have been a very logical and feasible solution to the tower challenge.

The Fei & Cheng proposal was the only one with a Taiwanese architecture firm and its collaborators without a non-Taiwan team as lead architect. Coming from Taiwan, this was a real departure from the strategies of the other firms, turning to a machine-like tower with multiple observation points as its main theme. This was a quite daring proposal, but probably too industrial-like imagewise to pass the scrutiny of the jury. This could well have been interpreted as a building, with its skeleton-like features still being under construction -Ed

Azusa Sekkei’s primary features, which set it apart from the other entries, were the periodic five-story cutouts at the edges forming various viewing platforms. As was the case with most of the proposals, the designers conceived their own transitional scheme to the linear park, which was notable for the proliferation of ponds and fountains. -Ed

FinalistKengo Kuma &Associates (Japan)

The Kengo Kuma proposal seemed to owe much of its architectural expression to Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany (below). In this case it was a stacking strategy with the vegetation taking over at the ascending levels. Whereas the visual approach to the tower from the city-side is logical, the transition to the building from the landscape point of view is problematic. Although there are two points of access to the linear garden at each end of the site, the very commercial nature of the drop-off entrance to the tower certainly takes away from any notion of an extension of the landscape transitioning into the building, either in appearance or spirit. -Ed

It’s almost strange to state that the format of the above competition is a departure from the recent trend toward invited competitions in Taiwan. But competition adviser Barry Cheng administered an open, two-stage international competition, which recently ended with the top two places going to well-known U.S.-based firms: Morphosis (Los Angeles) and Leers Weinzapfel (Boston).

After the initial stage of the competition, five teams for shortlisted for the second stage with results:

The challenge was to design a gas-powered plant that would be in harmony with the surrounding historical district.

The seven person jury included two non-Taiwanese architects,
• Marcos Cruz, Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London
• Charles Waldheim, Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard GSD

by James Reston, Jr.Arcade Publishing
New York (2017)
Hardcover, 267 pages
ISBN 9781628728569

View from the memorial to the Washington Monument
Photo: Paul Spreiregen

Having an idea is one thing. Realization of that idea is another. Maybe this should have been the main thrust of a new book on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Instead, the author of this book, whose interest in this topic dates back to his military service during the Vietnam conflict, chose to sensationalize the the cultural and political themes familiar to the project, rather than treat its progress in contrast to the evolution of other recent memorial competitions located on or near the Mall, the political and emotional components of the various memorials notwithstanding. The World War II Memorial and Eisenhower Memorial also were fraught with controversy by the public and in the press, whereby one hardly resembled the original design, and the other has not yet made it beyond the drawing board. Projects on or near the Mall run into similar obstacles in navigating their way through the DC approval process unscathed, regardless of the subject matter.\

A Famous Name Attracts 674 Entries

Extensions to buildings are normally regarded as significant projects by most architects, whereas linking two existing structures might appear as a lesser priority. On rare occasion of such a significant linkage, which took place between two buildings at Pratt Institute in New York was the project by Steven Holl, which had to deal with differing floor levels in fitting the connection to the two structures.

If ever there was a pressing need for a facility acting as arrival feature and processing point for a world-renowned landmark structure, a Visitors Center for the Reichstag had to be at the top of the list. Because it does house the sessions of the German parliament (Bundestag), it Is doubly important that a replacement for the present ad hoc arrangement be found, especially with rising security issues in mind.

This was not the first try at a solution to the issue. A futile attempt to arrive at a design for such a facility occurred back in 2012. But the discussion did not die, and an agreement was reached to stage an open competition in 2016 to reach a consensus for the design of the project. The fact that the competition was open and anonymous, rather than invited, could probably be attributed to recent pressure placed on the German Association of Architects (BDA) to give young architects the ability to participate on equal footing with established firms.

When we first included an article in COMPETITIONS about the restoration of Hannes Meyer’s Berlin Trade Union School in 2007, little did we anticipate that this subject would resurface on several occasions over the years. With the initial publication of the article,* copies went out to a number of interested parties outside of our subscriber base. What we next heard was that the project by the Bauhaus team led by Meyer had received the first World Monuments Prize—sponsored by Knoll. As it happened, one of the award jurors just happened to be a recipient of the issue with that article. A coincidence? In any case, German members of the restoration committee thought that the COMPETITIONS article played a role in that award and have kept us up to date about subsequent news concerning the Trade Union School.

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